Open data

Founder Personality Benchmarks

Name: Founder Personality Benchmarks
Creator: Founder Mode
Published: 2026-09-19
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Across 137 completed Founder Mode assessments from 128 people (counting each person's latest result), the average Big Five profile is openness 71, emotional stability 69, conscientiousness 68, extraversion 61 and agreeableness 53 on a 0 to 100 scale. Openness is the highest trait and agreeableness the lowest, the same direction published research finds for entrepreneurs.

137

assessments

128

people

Updated 2026-11-03CC BY 4.0Aggregate onlyDownload JSON

Big Five scores

Trait	Mean	Middle 50%	Famous founders*
Openness	71	65 to 78	86
Conscientiousness	68	60 to 76	82
Extraversion	61	50 to 74	62
Agreeableness	53	46 to 60	52
Emotional stability	69	66 to 74	79

*Average of our estimates for the 30 famous founders in the Big Five founders dataset, which are assessments from public behaviour, not test results. Histograms show 10-point bands from 0 to 100.

Entrepreneurial traits

Trait	Mean	Middle 50%
Risk tolerance	68	63 to 73
Visionary thinking	76	70 to 89
Execution focus	79	73 to 85
Work intensity	77	73 to 86
Resilience	66	50 to 75
Analytical rigor	71	65 to 80
Sales ability	63	50 to 75
People orientation	68	60 to 79
Creativity	64	50 to 81
Founder Mode score	71	65 to 76

By stage of the founder journey

Stage	People	Openness	Conscientiousness	Extraversion	Agreeableness	Emotional
Building solo	47	71	65	63	50	69
Building with co-founders	46	69	72	61	55	71
Exploring an idea	28	71	66	60	54	66

Mean scores. Only groups of 10 or more people are shown.

Which founder archetype people match

Katrina Lake27.3%

Jack Dorsey15.6%

Reid Hoffman12.5%

Paul Graham11.7%

Mark Zuckerberg8.6%

Whitney Wolfe Herd3.9%

Other20.3%

Closest of the 30 founder archetypes. Archetypes matched by fewer than 5 people are grouped as Other.

MBTI types

ENTJ18.8%

ENFJ17.2%

ESTP16.4%

ISTP10.9%

INFJ9.4%

ENTP7.8%

INTP6.3%

ESFP3.9%

Other9.4%

Types are derived from the Big Five scores, not from a separate MBTI questionnaire (see how MBTI maps to the Big Five). Because scores cluster above the midpoint, extraverted, intuitive and judging types are over-represented, which says as much about the method as about the people.

Stage of the founder journey

Building solo38.8%

Building with co-founders38%

Exploring an idea23.1%

Method and limitations

Scores come from the Founder Mode assessment: an adaptive questionnaire of 20 questions, where an AI model scores each answer against the Big Five and nine entrepreneurial traits on a 0 to 100 scale. It is not a clinically validated psychometric instrument such as the NEO-PI-R, so compare these numbers with each other, not with published population norms.

The sample is self-selected: people who found the site and chose to take a founder personality test. It is not representative of founders in general, and 128 people is a small sample. Treat differences of a few points as noise.

Included: completed assessments in production; where someone took the test more than once, only their most recent result counts, so the statistics describe people, not attempts. Excluded: test runs, our own team's accounts, and incomplete results. Figures refresh automatically as people take the test.

Privacy

Only aggregate statistics are published: counts, averages, quartiles and 10-point histograms. No individual answers, results, names, emails or LinkedIn data appear here, and nothing about age, family or finances is used. Any group smaller than 5 people is merged into Other, and breakdowns need at least 10 people. Nothing is published below 30 people in total.

How to cite

Founder Mode (2026). Founder Personality Benchmarks (n=128, updated 2026-11-03). https://enterfoundermode.com/founder-benchmarks

See where you fall

Take the free assessment and compare your scores with these benchmarks and with 30 famous founders. Under 10 minutes.

Start free assessment